Portrait of a Man

Around 1512 Venice was still working out who its next great painter would be. Giorgione, the young star, had died in the plague of 1510, leaving pictures so close to the early work of his friend Titian that the two hands are hard to tell apart even now. This portrait sits right in that uncertainty. It was once given to Palma Vecchio, and the sitter was once named as the writer Pietro Aretino. Both ideas have since been dropped, and the face and handling now point to the young Titian, near his Man with a Blue Sleeve in London. It probably reached England from Spain, brought back by an Earl of Bristol who served as ambassador in Madrid around 1760.